A brief history of the world’s most controversial emoji

By Rachel KaserIn recent years, few emoji have caused as big of a stir as the gun — both for what it looks like and what it represents, or represented, at least. The pistol was released as part of Unicode 6.0, the first standard to support emoji. At the time, almost every service rendered the emoji as an actual gun — a revolver or, in Google’s case, a gold-plated blunderbuss. Microsoft was the only outlier, showing a funky alien ray gun instead, though it eventually changed this to a revolver. The emoji has always had a bit of a negative connotation, just like the…